Reparations by Another Name: The Hidden Cost of School Choice

In the rush to correct decades of educational injustice, our nation may be worsening the very inequality it seeks to remedy. Seemingly stuck in a closed economy, students have been robbed of their potential, trapped by a system that in many cases has caused them academic, emotional, social, or sometimes physical harm. Awareness of this travesty has been growing, alongside a rising sense of collective guilt.

The failure of the public education system reflects poorly on both the citizenry and their elected representatives. In response, the school choice movement has emerged not merely as a reform effort, but as a form of reparations—a transactional attempt to settle a moral debt. It suggests that justice can be achieved not through transformation, but through redistribution. But how did we reach a point where education required atonement in the first place? Atonement, after all, implies the need to make amends for wrongdoing—an attempt to cover past guilt with present payment. The answer lies in a fundamental shift in public awareness of this issue: public funding led to public ownership, and public ownership enabled the centralization and capture of education itself.

For generations, countless students, particularly from poor and minority communities, have been trapped by compulsory education laws in government-run schools that stifle learning, creativity, and opportunity. These have not merely been struggling schools—they have been bureaucratic holding tanks, designed and operated by a state monopoly that has dictated curriculum, defined values, and diminished local authority. In many communities, these institutions have functioned as instruments of intellectual disenfranchisement and cultural indoctrination.

This has been educational slavery: a system where the state, not parents, holds the keys to a child’s future. The damage has been real. The consequences still ripple through families and neighborhoods. But now, rather than confronting the roots of that failure—compulsory systems, centralized mandates, and politicized content—our leaders have chosen an easier, more palatable path: financial atonement.

School choice programs, particularly government-funded Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and vouchers, are being sold as redemptive tools—modern-day reparations for a legacy of educational oppression. But rather than holding the architects of the system accountable, or addressing and dismantling the systemic problem, the invoice is quietly handed to a new generation of taxpayers, many of whom neither created the injustice nor will benefit from the proposed solution.

It’s an all-too-familiar pattern: declare a crisis, design a publicly funded solution, and demand that innocent citizens pay the price. The moral logic mirrors the broader reparations debate—asking today’s population to pay for yesterday’s sins, regardless of individual guilt or participation.

And make no mistake, this new wave of funding doesn’t come from nowhere. It is extracted from the public through taxes while leaving the institutions that led to this point in place, overseers and all. The truth is, educational choice has always been available to those willing to fund it themselves; what’s changing now is not the availability of categorical options, but who’s being forced to pay for them. Worse still, families who have long carried the burden of educating their children independently, without aid or entitlement, while still being forced to fund public education, now face a new insult: they are expected to bankroll the exit of others from a system they never trusted in the first place.

This is not justice. It’s a politically convenient bailout of a failed system. And while many families understandably seek relief from a system that failed them, we must be clear-eyed about the cost. Government funding is not neutral. It does not merely follow students; it follows them with conditions, oversight, and regulatory reach. What begins as a lifeline quickly becomes a leash. Public funding is the catalyst for public ownership, and public ownership was the catalyst for the original education capture.

When the state pays, the state claims authority, and authority over education inevitably becomes control over minds. In trying to remedy the failures of state-controlled education, we are retracing the exact steps that led to its downfall. By once again tying education to public funding, we invite the same regulatory capture, the same political manipulation, and the same erosion of parental authority that brought us here. This isn’t reform—it’s relapse. To break free from the legacy of educational slavery, we must stop retracing the same worn-out path and forge a new one, rooted not in state subsidies but in true educational sovereignty.